It’s the (early) morning after the night before and I am shattered. After days of build up, our Year 6 open evening finally arrived. It went well, but we have to be honest: how much can you really tell about a school from looking around it one evening when everything is staged for your benefit?

We are blessed in York with great state schools. You can choose any of our secondaries and be sure that your child will receive a decent education.

We were the final Open Evening of the cycle in York this year. You may believe that is a good thing, you may think the opposite.

Same show, different day

I don’t think it matters. The thing with Open Evenings is that they are all the same. I joke about this in my talk to parents. I bet my audience they have all seen rats dissected and hair made to stand on end in the science departments across the city. I say to them that we can all put on Open Evenings.

So to give them a real taste of what we are about, I invite them to join me over the next fortnight to tour the school and see it in action, as it is on a wet and windy Thursday afternoon in late October, when behaviour is at its trickiest.

Many take up the offer. For the next fortnight, I will be like the Pied Piper as I wander round the school with inquisitive mums, dads and their children, going wherever they desire. You see, the best test of a school is what’s going on when no-one is looking. We will go to the farthest corners of our rambling building and poke around and see what we find.

During my talk I arm the parents with a list of questions to ask staff and student helpers. Really knotty ones, like “What are the students’ toilets like and do you use them?”

Shared values

Ironically, our open evening coincided with Ofsted’s publication of the outcomes of their first Parent Panel, wherein there is a section entitled, Choosing a School.

Apparently, “parents said that the ‘feel’ of the school was the most important aspect for them”. Who’d have guessed?

It’s obvious, really, isn’t it? It’s not about corporate glitz, or how many iPads you have, or how big your multi-academy trust has grown. Successful schools are founded upon great relationships between students, teachers and parents.

We all want the same things - for the children to be happy and gain a fab set of examination results. The two go hand in hand. It’s not that complicated…

John Tomsett is headteacher at Huntington School in York